← In Our Time
In Our Time
Benjamin Disraeli
00:51:21
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most prominent Victorian politicians.
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Melvin Bragg
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BBC Sounds
BBC Sounds Music.
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Lawrence Goldman
Radio Podcasts this is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881, was a major figure in Victorian British politics, both as Prime Minister twice and for long periods as Leader of the Opposition. He was a gifted orator in Parliament and shared his views more widely through several popular nobles, including Sybil, or the Two nations, which was to inspire the idea of one nation conservatism. Queen Victoria mourned his death with the Primero's Wreath, an event marked by annual processions celebrating his life in politics, the life in which he was born Jewish and could only become an MP as his father had baptized him as a Christian. With me to discuss Benjamin Disraeli are Lawrence Goldman, Emeritus Fellow in History at St. Peter's College, University of Oxford, Emily Jones, Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester, and Daisy Hay, professor of English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter, Desi here. How did Disraeli start out in life? What kind of education did he have?
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Emily Jones
Well, he was, according to him, born in a library, which of course wasn't true, but what he meant by that was he was born into the world created by his father, Isaac Disraeli, a bookish minor celebrity in literary London, and he was the second of four children. His elder sister was Sarah, to whom he was very close because the family were Jewish. He was sent first of all to a tiny school in Islington and then to a non conformist boarding school in Blackheath. But after his baptism into the Anglican Church, he was then sent to an Anglican school in Epping Forest, where he was extremely unhappy as far as we can tell, possibly bullied, and he was removed from that school at 15. And he later was a bit resentful of the fact that as the family's fortunes improved, his Younger brothers Ralph and James, were sent to Winchester. So they had the kind of public school education that he felt would have been helpful for him.
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Lawrence Goldman
The key thing in what you said, as far as his future is concerned, is that he was baptized as an Anglican. His father suggested he do that. Why did his father want him to become an Anglican?
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Emily Jones
Well, his father, Isaac, fell out with the elders at the synagogue. And in 1817, partly on the advice of Isaac's friend Sharon Turner, the children were baptized into the Anglican Church. And it was a crucial moment for Disraeli because it enabled much of the career which happened afterwards.
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Lawrence Goldman
You couldn't be a Member of Parliament, you couldn't go to the Inns of Court and become a Lawy.
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Emily Jones
Exactly. And what it meant, therefore, is that Disraeli is to some extent an outsider in two traditions, in that he is Jewish by birth, but he suffers none of the more obvious penalties experienced by, say, his friend Lionel Rothschild in terms of exclusions, although there is a. Certainly a pervasive antisemitism that is part of his story. But he's also not quite Christian. He's not really Anglican. And that position as outsider in two traditions is, I think, very important in his story. So his education is a bit patchy, but what he does have is a literary education in Isaac's library. He reads and reads and reads, and when he leaves school at 15, he spends about a year reading in Isaac's library. So it's a kind of ad hoc education.
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Lawrence Goldman
Two of the people who read most fiercely were Byron and Shelley. Why did he go for Byron and Shelley? Let's stick with Byron.
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Emily Jones
Just one will do well, particularly after Byron dies in 1824, he becomes a kind of icon of alienated, heroic brilliance for young men who are looking to make a place for themselves in the world. World. And Disraeli is very influenced by the Byronic model. He travels in Europe twice in the 1820s, both time following in Byron's footsteps. And he's quite a fan. He has himself rowed over Lake Geneva by Byron's boatman. He finds Byron's factotum, Tita, and brings him back to the family house in Buckinghamshire. So he takes the business of Byronic imitation really very, very seriously.
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Lawrence Goldman
Thank you very much, Lawrence. We've touched on Disraeli being baptized as an Anglican. Can you develop that?
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Melvin Bragg
Yes. Unfortunately, we don't have a document evidence as to why he was baptized, but there are certain clues. His grandfather dies in 1860. His grandfather had come to this country in the mid 18th century. And it's thought that perhaps at that point it was felt that the family could alter their ancestry, if you like, and their religion. In addition, we know that his father Isaac had fallen out with the community of which he was a member. This is the synagogue known as Bevis Marks in London. It still functions and Isaac was asked to become a warden, to take on a leading role in the synagogue and he refused to do that.
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Lawrence Goldman
Did that offend people?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, it wasn't that surprising. The synagogue, in fact, had a procedure. You could pay a fine and then you were let off, but Isaac didn't pay the fine. Four years later, when they came back to him in 1817, that seems to have set off the procedure that led to the conversion of the children. More generally, as we've heard, there were certain prescriptions on Jews, not many. It's a small community in early 19th century Britain of about 30,000. And compared with the rest of Europe, they have remarkable freedoms. But as you said, there are some social prescriptions and some conventions which obviously work against them.
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Lawrence Goldman
Did his father foresee a possible political future by doing this?
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Melvin Bragg
I doubt that. I mean, I think what his father wanted was that his children should be able to progress in British public life and in British life generally. I don't think he saw his son as a politician. I'm not sure that we have a sense that he had any ambitions for his son as, as compared with Disraeli's ambitions. But it's worth saying that by this time there are some converted Jews who are MPs in the British Parliament, most famously David Ricardo, the bullion trader and very great political economist. So there are models that Disraeli could follow.
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Lawrence Goldman
It mattered to him that he could be financially independent. How did he go about that?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, not very well, I think, is the answer. He wasn't really financially secure until late middle age. It' actually a tale of woe from start to finish. He first of all invests in South African mining shares. It sounds like a Victorian cliche. And he lost a lot of money. Then he tried to set up.
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Lawrence Goldman
Where did he get a lot of money to lose?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, I mean, in fact, his father was not poor. I mean, and his grandfather left something like £30,000 to his father. So there was money in the family. They were outsiders, but they weren't without means. But he lost on the shares. Then he tried to set up a newspaper, the Representative, it was called, and he lost a lot of money there. Later he married his wife and they were devoted to each other. But he believed she was a wealthier woman than she actually was. And so it carried on. I mean, he had to be lent money to buy a country estate. No Victorian politician could possibly act as such without an estate.
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Lawrence Goldman
We've come to that. How he set himself up as a politician, we think of political. Different political parties. Emily. Emily Jones. It wasn't quite like that in Disraeli's youth, but not far from it. Can you tell us about the Whigs and the Tories and the Radicals?
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BBC Sounds
So, obviously, political groupings and parties, in form as well as content, were very different to what they are today. The Whigs were broadly associated with a constitutional position that emphasised the role of Parliament against royal prerogative and looked at kind of dismantling some of the privileges of the Anglican Church. Whereas the Tories, who had been known as the King's Friends, had historically looked more to the monarchical element in the Constitution and sought to preserve the privileges of the Church. And the radicals had a slightly different constitutional heritage, tended to look further back into the ancient constitutional past to locate rights and privileges that had once been held but had since been lost. And they tended to argue for the need to restore those lost liberties and those lost privileges.
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Lawrence Goldman
How did he find his political home?
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BBC Sounds
He first stands for parliament in the 1833 and he suffers a series of electoral defeats over the 1830s. I think it's in this period where he also produces his Vindication of the English Constitution, which is published in 1835. And in the Vindication, as well as in Coningsby and Sybil later novels, the other novels, they articulate a very distinctive historical and political account of modern British constitutional development that I think tell us why he would not have been a Whig and why he would have had more sympathy towards the Tories. So he sees the Whigs as an anti national, factional set of exclusive, in his words, Venetian oligarchs who claimed to be the champions of the people, but in reality, to Disraeli, they did no such thing. He has a very unique interpretation of post Reformation history, including the dissolution of the monasteries. So the Whigs he associates with the greedy land grabbers who appropriated lots of monastic land. And he also offers a kind of Tory interpretation of the glorious revolution of 1688, which the Whigs had kind of championed as this great moment in the progress of English liberty, in getting rid of James II and bringing over William and Mary. But Disraeli argued that this was really not true and bringing over William and Mary had instead introduced this kind of nefarious system of Dutch finance, which meant national debt and had also increased wars with France. So Disraeli's Tory alternative that appealed to him was an idea of a free monarch, a prosperous people, multilateral tariff negotiations and alliance with France.
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Lawrence Goldman
Daisy, a lot happened to him from between 1837 and 1839. One of those was marriage. Can you tell us about it?
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Emily Jones
Yes. He first meets his wife, who is a wife of a Tory MP called Marianne Lewis in the early 1830s. And he describes her initially as a pretty little woman, a flirt and a rattle.
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Lawrence Goldman
What does a rattle mean?
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Emily Jones
She's a bit of a rackety character. She has feathers in her hair and garish jewellery and she's a bit. She's a bit vulgar and.
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Lawrence Goldman
Sounds just a treat for you, doesn't it?
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Emily Jones
She's a tiny little. A tiny little vivacious woman. And in 1837, she persuades her husband, who is a Tory MP of superlatively little distinction. He doesn't speak once in the entire time he's in Parliament, that he should select Disraeli as his running mate for the constituency of Maidstone. So you have two Tory candidates and they go out on the campaign to other three of them, and Mary Ann announces in a letter to her brother that she is safely delivered of two twin members, which tells you more that you need to know about her. But then, in 1838, she is widowed, leaving her a rich, vivacious widow and a Wyndham Lewis dies suddenly. And a heady romance ensues between her and Disraeli, in which everyone around them thinks that she is an idiot and he is courting her for her money. In fact, the truth is a bit more complicated than that. It undeniably is a marriage of convenience in lots of ways, but between them, they whip up a fantasy of romance, which really matters to both of them that it should be true. And there are all sorts of contingencies around this marriage.
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Lawrence Goldman
What are these fantasies?
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Emily Jones
Fantasies of a kind of lovelorn separation, fantasies of parting, of insuperable objects thrown in their way.
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Lawrence Goldman
Which they surmount.
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Emily Jones
Which they surmount. He writes terrible poetry to her. They invent a kind of sign language in the letters where there's a symbol that looks a bit like a kind of turnip, which stands for the love that is too great to be articulated. There's all this sort of flummery. But in 1839, in August, they are married. The day before their marriage, Disraeli writes to one of his creditors and says he must not write to him during his honeymoon because Mary Ann has no idea about the extent of his debt. All creditors are instructed to communicate with him only through his sister Sarah. So the marriage starts with all sorts of deceptions, but the great thing about it is that over its 30 year passage, they make that romance come true. It ends as a great and true romance, but it's always a marriage which is characterized as odd by other people, but it is crucial to his political survival because it gives him an income. At the point that at the moment Parliament is dissolved, he knows he's liable to be arrested for debt. It gives him just enough solidity to cling on to life in Britain. At the point where he's threatened with exile in France, he's that bankrupt. So it comes at a really crucial moment for him.
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Lawrence Goldman
And it's worth telling people that members of Parliament were not paid.
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Emily Jones
They weren't paid, but they were also immune from arrest for bankruptcy and. Or indeed for other crimes. Which meant that the moment that Parliament was dissolved, Disraeli knew the bailiffs would be there for him. At one point, he lets the bailiffs into Mary Ann's house on Grosvenor Gate while she's out and they catalogue the entire contents and then give him a note of exchange for them. She has no idea that he has signed over everything, down to the salt cellars in their house to the bailiffs. So the money worries don't stop. But they are managed through this marriage.
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Lawrence Goldman
It's quite a big burden for a young man to carry, isn't it, when he's already one sort of outsider. It's also a problem with the very few people he knows in his position. Pal Parliament, who's so deeply in debt.
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Emily Jones
That's true. There's a wonderful moment in the Disraeli Letters from the 1850s where he says, I have never owed a penny in my life. And the editorial note in this very serious edition just says the editorial mind boggles, which I think is a wonderful. A wonderful moment. But Mary Ann is also quite well connected. She is the best friend of Mary Dawson, her next door neighbor, who is the sister of Robert Peel. It's through Mary Ann and Mary Dawson's friendship that Disraeli is sort of inveigled into Peale's outer circle in the early 1840s. So she's not unuseful to him politically either.
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Lawrence Goldman
Let's turn to Peel. Lawrence Don's Goldman. He was. Peel was a very important, significant person then, but Disraeli wasn't particularly fond of him or taken into his group. What was going on there? No.
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Melvin Bragg
Well, in the 1840s, eventually they're at odds, seriously. So Peel forms a Conservative government in 1841, after the election in that year. And Disraeli, who is really bursting for a job, actually writes to him offering his services in the government and Peel simply ignores him. They are chalk and cheese, really. Peel is the son of a great cotton master from Lancashire, a man of business, a very serious minded statesman. And Disraeli's Persona at this point is a Vedanti in Parliament, not someone to be taken very seriously and obviously as an outsider, quite a different kett of fish as compared with most Tory MPs. The result of this, a personal sort of animus, leads actually to a kind of political and ideological difference between them, because Disraeli, on the back benches of the Tory Party, forms around him a group known as Young England, who try to set out a different philosophy.
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Lawrence Goldman
Did he have significant supporters there?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, he had three. Three MPs were. It's a start. But it's interesting because they lay out a kind of position which has much greater significance. George Smyth, Alexander Bailey Cochrane and Lord John Manners are their names. These are the four who form the core of Young England. They're all backbench Tory MPs. Peel is taking the party leftwards, we might say. He is a Liberal Tory and in the course of the 1840s he's moving towards free trade, which means selling out the agriculturalists, the landholders.
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Lawrence Goldman
What do you mean by selling out?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, they depend on agricultural protection, on tariffs, to keep out cheap foreign foodstuffs. That makes the price of bread that much higher, of course, for the working classes in Britain. And Peel has to deal with a social and economic crisis in the early 1840s. And one way to deal with that is to lower the price of basic foodstuffs. And that means ending agricultural protection, which isn't for the British landholders. Now, Disraeli takes the side of the protectionists, as they're called. There were lots of young movements across Europe in this period, young Italy and so forth, and we had one Young England, and Disraeli was at the center of it. They're philosophically arguing with Peel. They dislike the leftward liberal trend in the Tory Party and they dislike the fact that Peel is courting, as they see it, the middle classes, the entrepreneurs, the commercial sorts, they try to put forward a different model, an England in which the landed classes appeal over the heads of the middle classes to the people. They depend upon the patriotism and the deference of the people.
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Lawrence Goldman
Isn't this a bit optimistic when the people had no votes?
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Melvin Bragg
That's true, absolutely. I mean, it's the sort of politics that many historians would say had no future in it at all. But it chimes with this idea of a romantic conservatism, a kind of fantasy conservatism, but nevertheless a kind of argumentative position that can be used against the materialism, the cynicism, as Disraeli thinks of it, of Peel and the Liberal Tories.
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Lawrence Goldman
But what impact did it have?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, not great until the final crisis of the Peel government at the beginning of 1846, when Peel comes out openly for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the end of agricultural protection. And then, in a sense, Disraeli, it appears to the Tory backbenches has been proved right. Peel has ratted on his party, Peel is a traitor to the landed classes. And Disraeli is suddenly thrown to the very center of politics and makes some very notable speeches in those debates in which he blames Peel for being a traitor to his class and to his party.
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Lawrence Goldman
Meantime, also with his left hand, Emily, he's writing novels. He started with the pernicious novel, but let's not talk about that. Let's go into Sybil. It came out in 1845, a year before Lawrence was referring to, and it was to have a big impact.
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BBC Sounds
Yes. So Sybil is one of the most famous examples of the condition of England novels of the 1840s that also includes works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley. And they were all concerned with raising awareness of the terrible conditions that most of the population were living and working in. Sybil was part of what's known as the Young England trilogy. So before Sybil in 1844 was Coningsby, and after Sybil in 1847 came Tancred. And all three of the novels were concerned with a theme of leadership, moral, spiritual leadership, at a time when Disraeli really sensed that significant forces supporting the country were falling into potential disintegration. So Coningsby addressed political leadership and political parties. Tancred addressed the role of the Church and Sybil was concerned with the condition of the people. The novel itself was drawn from Disraeli's own researches by visits to the North. He read a huge amount of parliamentary blue books or reports. He read Royal commissions and Sybil itself. The novel is a drama, a political novel, a social novel, a romance. It starts by the introduction of the youngest son of an aristocratic family, Charles Egremont. His entry into Parliament at which he accrues some debts, naturally and his increasing familiarity with what was known as the kind of the condition of England question the editions of the people alongside his growing kind of romance and love of the titular character of Sybil Gerrard, who is at the when we meet her training to be a Catholic nun. She's also the daughter of a Chartist activist. So Sybil is really representative of a kind of feminine, spiritual, moral power in kind of shaping and guiding Egremonts growing concern with the condition of the people.
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Lawrence Goldman
And what sort of impact was he intending to have and did he have with this book?
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BBC Sounds
Sybil covers a huge range of themes from agricultural depression to Chartist politics and riots to the changing of agricultural titles and caused a kind of sensation. There's lots of letters that were written to Disraeli and by people who were very moved by the depictions of the women in the mines that were conveyed. The condition of agricultural labourers as well as the overcrowding in urban areas. And Cibyl itself was to have a really significant later legacy because Cibyl is picked up and becomes a really important source for some of the earliest major socio and economic historians of the later 19th century who were interested in ill effects of industrialization on the working classes.
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Lawrence Goldman
Deja, you want to come in?
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Emily Jones
I was just thinking that really interesting to hear Emily give a kind of political historians account of Sybil, which makes complete sense to me. But the other thing I was reflecting on as you were talking, Emily, is that all three of those 1840s novels, and indeed actually the 1830s novels, are in some ways an attempt to test out a kind of rewriting of a proposition of Shelley. So Shelley writes very famously that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And in his novels in the 1830s, but particularly in the 1840s, Disraeli is asking the question, can the poet, can the man of genius also be the world's acknowledged legislator? It's a reforming of an idea which Carlyle is also testing out in the 1840s in his lectures on heroes and Hero worship. Can a man of genius, a visionary, a man of imagination, note a man, also be a kind of political actor? That's what Disraeli wants to be. And in the figures of Egremont and Coningsby, and indeed in Tancred and Sidonia, you have a kind of. You have versions of that heroic man of genius and action, the two things.
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Lawrence Goldman
You needed if you went into the Commons, really was money, which he borrowed. And even better, or just an estate, a contrast state, where you could have your meetings and where you could have positioned and be part of the. Let's call it barony. That will do. How did he get his estate?
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Emily Jones
Well, it's a great story and it becomes particularly important after, as Lawrence was saying, he splits the Conservatives, he splits the protectionists away from Peel and therefore becomes a slightly accidental spokesman for the landed interest, while also having no land himself. He teams up with an MP called Lord George Bentinck, who's the younger son of the Duke of Portland, and together they represent the protectionist interest. And it's Bentinck family, through the representations that George Bentinck makes, who agree to support the purchase of Hughenden, the estate in Buckinghamshire that Disraeli buys after his father Isaac's death in 1846. But again, as so often in Disraeli's story, it's something of a mirage, because three weeks after the purchase is concluded, George Bentinck dies of a heart attack and his father is much less clear about wanting to support Disraeli. So he offers to fund the purchase of Hughenden, but on the basis that he will take out a mortgage for £25,000 and he will receive all the rents. So, on paper, Disraeli becomes a master of his estate, man of the country. But in practice, his estate is owned by someone else, Lawrence.
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Melvin Bragg
But it's worth just ending the story in an interesting way, because at the end of the 1850s, the Portland family call in the loan and Disraeli is facing ruin once again. He hasn't got £25,000, but in the kind of Disraelian tweak that you get used to in this story.
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Lawrence Goldman
Well, an amazingly benevolent coincidence, you might say.
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Melvin Bragg
That's right.
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Lawrence Goldman
A tweak doesn't do justice.
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Melvin Bragg
It doesn't. No, indeed. His. His dilemma comes to the ear of a rich Jewish widow who was living in a hotel in Torquay. And she is Mrs. Bridges Williams, and she sends him £25,000 to pay off the loan, with one condition only, that she is buried in the family plot next to Disraeli. And if you go to Hughenden Chapel, you can see Mrs. Bridges Williams grave next to Disraeli's. And that was the payoff.
- [26:10]
Emily Jones
It's a tiny bit more complicated than that. And in the interim, a Conservative backer does take on all the debts and agrees to service them at a much lower level of interest. But Mrs. Bridges Williams will leave Disraeli a legacy. But they do have to wait for her to die, and she doesn't die until 1863. So there is a slightly fraught bridging period between the Portlands calling in the loan and Mrs. Bridges Williams doing the decent thing and dying and leaving her fortune. And their friend, one of their friends describes them arriving in her drawing room, both dressed black as crows, in high glee at the fact that this longed for legacy. They are very fond of Mrs. Bridges Williams, but nevertheless her death is a sort of blessing for them.
- [26:51]
Lawrence Goldman
Well, we saw do that. Lawrence. Can we. Can I come back to you? He spent a lot of his time in opposition, and I think you believe that he was the greatest opposition leader there's ever been.
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Melvin Bragg
I think he was a very great leader of the Opposition up there.
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Lawrence Goldman
So why?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, he has a problem. The Conservatives have a problem. This is a generation that belongs to the Liberal Party from 1846 and the split of the Tories over the Corn laws through to 1874. This is really a period of Liberal dominance. The Conservatives form three minority administrations. They never have a majority, but they form governments briefly, 1852 to 3, 1858 to 9, 1866 to 8. And in this period they depend upon Disraeli above all in the House of Commons to worst the Liberal big guns. And he's clever and witty and carries the House with him. And humor, of course, can do an awful lot.
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Lawrence Goldman
Is this rather surprising given his. Given the antisemitism that was drifting around the place?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, yes. I mean, it's an issue, undoubtedly for him less, I think, in the House of Commons than in the public realm more generally. I mean, he has to put up with caricaturists and cartoonists in the press and veiled comments all the time. But I think his identity in politics, if not secure, is at least accepted because of his talents. I mean, were he not to be so talented, he would not have been accepted in quite that way.
- [28:29]
Lawrence Goldman
An interesting thing is the older he got, the more he went back to his Jewishness. Is that right?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, yes, he never really left it. I mean, in 1847, he's very prominent in the debates over what was known as the Jew Bill, Jewish emancipation, really. With his back benches looking on aghast, Disraeli makes a famous speech in favour of Jewish emancipation, drawing attention to his Jewishness and not in any way trying to hide the fact. And I think he used it really, because it made him different. It made him an outsider who was exotic. It added to his Persona. I mean, he was sincere in everything he said in that debate. He was sincere in his regard for the Jewish religion. He valued his Jewish roots very obviously, but obviously it could also be used as a way of making himself out to be a rather special figure in politics. So I think his colleagues came to accept it. It was wider society that had problems with him.
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Lawrence Goldman
Can we continue that with you, Emily, about Disraeli's achievements in power as Prime Minister?
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BBC Sounds
If we were going to go with the hits, I would focus on three themes, which would be parliamentary reform, social legislation and imperial and foreign policy. So if we go back to the. If we go back to 1866 and 1867, Disraeli's name is intrinsically associated with the passing of the 1867 Reform Act. So he's not Prime Minister, then, he's Chancellor, but leader in the Commons. And the bill that eventually passed under Disraeli in 1867 was far more radical than the bill that had been proposed by the Liberals. Eventually, as it goes through Parliament, all of the kind of amendments, the fancy franchises that would have given additional votes to people with certain types of property or university degrees, are kind of stripped away. And the result of the bill, the act, is that the electorate is doubled from 1 million to 2 million adult males, mostly in urban areas. And the significance of the bill for his critics was that it enabled them to continue to portray him as an opportunist, a political manipulator and devoid of kind of serious political principle. But for his supporters and for his later admirers, the passage of the 1860 Reform act was, on the one hand, evidence of consistency with a kind of anti Whig view that saw the 1832 Reform act as a kind of factional middle class piece of legislation. And that also enabled his supporters to portray him as a prophet who had foreseen the coming of. Of Tory democracy, possibilities of the Conservative working man and later woman, and essentially the democracy that votes Tory once he becomes prime minister in 1874. The two key themes that are associated with that period are the social legislation of 1875, which included a whole raft of bills on housing, on public health, on the adulteration of food and drink, on trade unions. And this is really seen as being on the one hand, again to his supporters, as the principles of the young England novels put into practice. And from 1875, Disraeli is increasingly preoccupied by matters of empire and also foreign policy. So the purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875, Victoria becomes Empress of India in 76. There's the Anglo Afghan War, the Anglo Zulu War, and most significantly, the growing problem known as the Eastern Question. The Eastern crisis that surrounded the kind of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and concerns around the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. And Disraeli was particularly concerned with encroaching Russian militarism. The problem was that the Eastern Question allowed Gladstone and Israelis opponents to portray Disraeli in supporting Ottoman rule, which included supposedly kind of condoning what were known as the Bulgarian atrocities against Christians in the region, once again allowed his critics to portray him as alien other and fundamentally as standing outside of an orthodox Christian morality.
- [32:51]
Lawrence Goldman
Thank you. Can I turn to you again, Daisy? Enter Queen Victoria.
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Emily Jones
They didn't get on very well to begin with, because Victoria, as many people will know, was a great fan of Robert Peel and she held Disraeli responsible for his downfall. And she thought Mary Ann was vulgar. However, after Albert died in 1861, Disraeli really was able to sympathize with her imaginatively, emotionally, to understand the extent of her loss. He got on very well with Albert.
- [33:17]
Lawrence Goldman
Was this calculated or natural?
- [33:19]
Emily Jones
I think it was natural because he liked Albert a great deal. They worked together on various projects and he understood imaginatively her loneliness. So he was instrumental in the establishing of a memorial to Albert at South Kensington. And he didn't hold her responsible for her withdrawal from public life in the way that many others did. And it blossomed into another great romance in his story, the relationship between Disraeli and Victoria. He was said by some to have laid it on with a trial when he referred to them both as we authors because of her journal of the Highlands. But the relationship really took flight in terms of the courtly romancing of the sovereign when, as premier, he visited Balmoral in 1868 and she became intensely interested in his life. Gifts were exchanged between her and Marianne and she then remained very, very attached to him, rather to the detriment of poor Gladstone, who she held responsible in his turn for the downfall of Disraeli. And it's skipping forward slightly in the story, but when the Disraelis were both very ill in 1867, Victoria wrote anxiously, asking for news of them. And most unusually, after Disraeli died, she came to Hughenden to take tea and to sit in his drawing room. So it was again an affair of the head and the heart for both of them.
- [34:40]
Lawrence Goldman
Emily, let's go back to one nation conservatism. How is that Getting on.
- [34:44]
BBC Sounds
One nation conservatism is usually invoked to signify a holistic, socially minded brand of conservatism that claims sympathy with social concerns and seeks to improve national unity whilst maintaining existing institutions and systems of power. I think the term is generally attributed to Stanley Baldwin in 1924 and is very famously used by the One Nation group when they were founded in 1950, which included unlikely members such as Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell. Disraeli himself. There are certainly materials within Disraeli's life, his writings, to support an understanding of Disraeli as a one nation conservative. On that definition, I think that it's very unconvincing to portray Disraeli as simply as an opportunist and without principle. It's particularly easy to find evidence, for example, for Disraeli's belief in the need to improve the condition of the people. But Disraeli wasn't a Democrat. He wouldn't have approved of extensive forms of state welfare. And I also think it's really important to understand that even when you have these kind of raw materials, it still takes a huge amount of editing, adaptation, selection to first of all kind of extract Sybil in particular as his most representative and significant text, and then to also, as happens after his death, portray Disraeli as a serious thinker, as a great statesman and as a guide to modern problems. That is kind of adapting his 19th century Tory politics into a 20th century political agenda that is fundamentally much more concerned with questions of welfare and economic management.
- [36:29]
Lawrence Goldman
Thank you, Daisy. He wrote many novels. One of them, La Fere, was phenomenally successful. Can you tell us about that and about the other later novels?
- [36:38]
Emily Jones
It certainly was. This is how Disraeli recovers from being Prime Minister. He writes a novel. He retreats to Hughenden and he writes a novel. He does it twice. The first time was Lothair, which is an account of the struggles with the Catholic Church in various complicated ways. It's an enormous success. Ships are named after it, streets are named after it. The Associated Cable Company try have to block a New York publisher who want to have the whole thing telegraphed under the Atlantic, because it would knock out the telegraph for two or three days. It sells an enormous copy numbers both in Britain and in America. It's a sort of passion project for Disraeli. It's great fun in these late novels, these reckonings with some of the people both of the years when he's politically active, but also the years which are politically formative for him. That's what these novels really are concerned with.
- [37:29]
Lawrence Goldman
Was he rated then? I mean, there's some very big novelists writing then. Was he rated alongside them?
- [37:36]
Emily Jones
Not by them. I mean, Trollope and Dickens both couldn't stand him, partly because he got paid very well. He got paid £10,000 for Lothair, which drove him nuts. But he was very popular with the public. But he's a kind of celebrity novelist by this point. People buy Lothair partly because it is. It has a novelty of being by a former Prime Minister. So he's not widely respected by his fellow novelists, but he's held in such wide affection by the public in this, at this point, that his novels are widely read and enjoyed.
- [38:05]
Lawrence Goldman
So are we saying his. His myth not didn't get in the way of his books, his myth spread them on that way?
- [38:12]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, I think that's right. I think by the end he was almost. I wouldn't say a caricature. That would be unkind.
- [38:19]
Lawrence Goldman
It would be very unkind.
- [38:20]
Melvin Bragg
It would be unkind. I mean, he was a man obviously, of enormous qualities and depth, with a vast hinterland. But there's a sense in which his Persona had been established and he'd found his way into that position we sometimes refer to as a national treasure. But he understood the British people. That's the interesting thing in the 1870s, that famous Disraelian phrase, we must come in on the principle of not harassing the people. What he'd understood is that by the 1870s, the middle classes had been satiated. They'd done very well in the mid Victorian period, and they didn't really want Gladstonian reform and radicalism to take it all away from them. The Liberals were promising radical changes and Disraeli understood that there was a kind of centrism that you should aim at and that the British liked to be governed from the centre and liked to be left alone. And so in the 1870s, so many of his speeches are about the glory of the constitution, the established institutions of the nation, with a little touch of reformism, some public health reform and so forth. And that suited the mood of the middle classes very well, many of whom, in the 1874 election, left liberalism for the first time. They voted for the Liberals in the 1850s and 60s. But in 1874, he got it right. He judged the people perfectly and the middle classes voted for him and for the Tories.
- [39:48]
Lawrence Goldman
How about the working classes that he set out to educate and.
- [39:51]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, I mean, enroll. This is part of, I think, the mythology, because later, after he died, as has been suggested, there was the idea that he'd seen a kind of Tory democracy, that he'd understood. The angel in the marble. This was the phrase of a Times editorial after he died, the angel in the marble. That he'd seen the Tory working man. And in a way, of course, that's correct because working class conservatism was a very important theme in the late 19th century and beyond into the 20th century. But. But whether Disraeli divined that is an open question. I mean, it's part of the mythology and part of the debate really, when.
- [40:34]
BBC Sounds
If you think about Disraeli as a speaker in comparison to someone like Gladstone and later Salisbury, he spoke predominantly in Parliament. He didn't become a great mass platform speaker, orator in the way that Gladstone or Salisbury did. So his actual style of speaking to the people was through Parliament and not in those big public meetings.
- [40:56]
Lawrence Goldman
We're coming to the end of this program now, unfortunately. I'm enjoying it like anything. He also had a reputation outside this country. Bismarck, for instance, Chancellor of Germany, said was a huge admirer of him.
- [41:08]
Melvin Bragg
Der alte Jude, das is der Mann, the old Jew. He's the one was what Bismarck said about him in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin. And one of the things we should say is, old and ill and tired as he was, he dominated the Congress of Berlin, which patched up Europe after the Balkan wars of the 1870s. And that was a very important moment in European history. It put off the great crises of the early 20th century for a generation, and it may well be the last time that a British statesman dominated a European diplomatic congress. So it very much counts in Disraeli's.
- [41:48]
BBC Sounds
Legacy and within British politics. He has an enormous influence in the Labour Party as well, because of the significance of Sybil and the Two nations kind of metaphor in providing a kind of common vocabulary for talking about inequality, material inequality, throughout the 20th century, particularly in moments of economic slump, later, deindustrialization, Disraeli, Sybil and the Two nations becomes a rhetorical device to hold Conservative governments to account, both outside of the Conservative Party and inside of the party.
- [42:24]
Lawrence Goldman
Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Daisy Hay, Emily Jones and Ron Skoleman. Next week, wormholes, the tantalizing theory of shortcuts in space time out there in the universe. Thanks for listening.
- [42:38]
BBC Sounds
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few.
- [42:41]
Emily Jones
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [42:45]
Lawrence Goldman
I start with you, Emily. What did you not have time to say you would like to have said so.
- [42:50]
BBC Sounds
Something that is of particular interest to me is people often compare or associate Disraeli with Edmund Burke, who is also known as a founder of modern conservatism. But I think talking about what Disraeli made of Burke really helps you to understand the difference between Whigism and Toryism. So people often see Disraeli as being a great admirer of Burke. And Disraeli really did admire Burke as someone who could also do literature and politics and also really admired Disraeli for doing what he wanted to do for the Tories, for the Whigs in the late 18th century, which was essentially to enliven, re, articulate and modernise Whig principles for the modern day and re educate his party. That's what Disraeli wanted to do for the Tories. But people often assume that he is Burkean in some way, but really he sees Burke as the Archwig trumpeter and not as a Tory. So the common assumption that Disraeli and Burke are somehow connected and he takes his political thought from Burke is quite misconceived, I think.
- [43:57]
Lawrence Goldman
Daisy, same tube at. Could you mention his dandyism, which was a big part of him? He just came out as a dandy.
- [44:05]
Emily Jones
Certainly as a young man. He was part of his Byronic Persona was about clothes and appearing as a kind of very glamorous, alienated intellectual, bright colors, jewels. Of course, men didn't start dressing soberly until later in the 19th century, at which point he turned quickly and then began to inhabit that position too. I think the other thing I would like to say a little bit more about, though, is Huenden, because I talked about Hughenden's slightly fragile economic basis, but Disraeli described it as his rock and it really did become a place of great sanctuary and happiness. He and Mary Ann commissioned the architect Edward Buxton Lamb to redo a quite plain Georgian house in true Gothic Revival style. And although in the 1850s there was a lot of unhappiness at hughenden, by the 1860s, once its economic foundations were a bit sturdier. Disraeli loved being a man of the country. Constance de Rothschild described walking through the woods with him and he had an axe in his hand. And she said, this hand, which had never held anything heavier than a pen, he loved being friends with the woodsman. He described having 10 guests over a weekend and said, it's as hard as work as keeping an inn. This man who certainly did not play or do the job of innkeeper, but it really gave him a kind of place from which he could fly. I think Hughenden is a really important part of his story in the 1860s and the 1870s. So that's what I would want to bring back into the story, the happiness of Hughenden, particularly in the later stages of his life.
- [45:36]
Lawrence Goldman
Lauren?
- [45:37]
Melvin Bragg
Well, I suppose if it were anything that I'd like to add, it would be that what, for me, at least, threads together his life and career is reverence for past things and for things as they were. He's living in an age of progress. That's what we associate with Victorian Britain, technological and other forms of progress, industrial and so forth, commercial. And of course, he favors the people being fed, and he favors growing wealth and so forth. But at heart, his instinct is always to admire things from the past and want to revere them and preserve them, which is why he's good with people like Queen Victoria, why he's good with so many British institutions. And, of course, if one thinks about the psychology of this, one realizes that somebody who is an outsider, who's been allowed to have really a remarkably privileged place at the heart of British political and social life, would indeed revere those institutions and not really want to see them change. He becomes more British than the British, even though he starts out as the grandson of an Italian immigrant who's come to England and a man who's from a different religion and with, if you like, the conservatism, we can use that word of the converted, he's more aligned with keeping Britain as it was than almost anyone else in the House of Commons.
- [47:05]
Emily Jones
I think that part thing about Disraeli being more English than the English is so important because that's how he dies, as a symbol of England with an understanding that that is in part a construction, but it's a construction that everyone happily falls for. So it is. It's a really important part of the end of his story, isn't it?
- [47:25]
Melvin Bragg
Yes.
- [47:27]
BBC Sounds
I just really think. I think the success of the play and the film Disraeli is just really extraordinary. GEORGE ARLESS PLAYS the play is first stage in Broadway in the west end between 1911 and 16. It's a smash hit across the Atlantic. George Arlis makes an entire career that stretches to the Second World War in playing Disraeli in various forms. The film is the Warner Brothers film that's produced in 1929 of the play. It's a huge success. It's seen all around the world by all kinds of audiences. And Arlis is then picked up by the Conservative and Unionist Film association and he is dressed up as Disraeli once more and put into a film with Stanley Baldwin made to kind of quotes selections from Disraeli speeches and writings to portray what the principles of modern conservatism were in 1931. So the combination of political culture, celebrity culture was essential in his life, but it really just goes through the whole of the 20th century as well.
- [48:37]
Emily Jones
He'd have been so pleased.
- [48:38]
BBC Sounds
I know.
- [48:40]
Melvin Bragg
And just a final point for me would be that I think we misunderstand him more than the Victorians misunderstood him, in a sense. Your point, Melvin, that you know, by the end of his life he's a national treasure and he's much admired and loved, is clearly true. I think we misunderstand him because we don't understand Victorian politics. We think that politics is about manifestos and radical commitments and a list of measures that governments will pass once they come into power. But Disraeli and most Victorians didn't think about politics in that way at all. They thought that one had to do the Queen's business, one had to keep the ship of state secure. And Disraeli was always for taking short term kind of opportunities in politics. Playing the game, dishing the wigs is one of his famous phrases, and that's what he wanted to do. And this was all part of politics. In the House of Commons, very few politicians had a sense that they would do great things in power. And Disraeli clearly fits into a kind of Victorian cultural political mold, where politics is a game and you play it with sincerity, but it's not something, as it were, that you turn to the people and say, we will do these things for you. So there's been a tendency to say, oh, Disraeli is an opportunist, he's heavily ambitious, he doesn't stand for anything. And you find that in contemporary and recent interpretations. I think we're misunderstanding him because we're not really understanding how the Victorians played politics.
- [50:14]
Emily Jones
It's so much too easy to read him as an opportunist, isn't it? And I just wonder too, about the idea that Disraeli is a kind of dilettante. I wonder what that is also refracting in terms of our own prejudices too.
- [50:27]
Melvin Bragg
But I think it's a great advantage to him that he never went to a public school and he never went to the university because he had a quite individual intellectual development. He read different books, he thought in different ways. And so he's always kind of coming at Victorian culture from another position, which makes him remarkable and different. And people listen because of that difference.
- [50:50]
Lawrence Goldman
It's sometimes enjoyable to tick off the people who were more successful than any others and they didn't go to university. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you.
- [51:00]
Emily Jones
Thank you.
- [51:00]
BBC Sounds
Thank you.
- [51:01]
Melvin Bragg
Does anyone want tea or coffee?
- [51:03]
BBC Sounds
Tea or coffee?
- [51:04]
Melvin Bragg
Melvin?
- [51:04]
Lawrence Goldman
Tea, I think I've been out. Tea, Tea, Tea.
- [51:07]
Melvin Bragg
I'll have a cup of tea. That'd be lovely. Yes, please.
- [51:08]
Emily Jones
That'd be lovely. Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [51:10]
BBC Sounds
Thanks, everybody.
- [51:11]
Melvin Bragg
In our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [51:18]
Emily Jones
I was definitely too young when I.
- [51:20]
BBC Sounds
Was leader of the Opposition not to.
- [51:22]
Lawrence Goldman
Do many of the other jobs I did in government admissions.
- [51:25]
Emily Jones
And insights from the people who shape how we think. I would say my family, well, gave.
- [51:30]
BBC Sounds
Myself and my two siblings a critical eye.
- [51:33]
Emily Jones
And because it's not just politicians who.
- [51:35]
Lawrence Goldman
Mold our lives, we also hear from.
- [51:37]
Emily Jones
Economists, comedians and best selling authors. It's the fastest way to change things. You do need politics, but if you want to change something overnight, culture is the quickest way to do it.
- [51:47]
Melvin Bragg
Conversations, not newsy interrogations.
- [51:50]
Emily Jones
That's political thinking.
- [51:52]
Lawrence Goldman
With me, nick Robinson from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.